Student’s book on private sector espionage published

AN EYE-OPENING book uncovering the role of espionage and intelligence in digital business has been published by an undergraduate student.

Debora Barbosa’s Knowledge is Profit: The Role of Intelligence and Espionage in Business looks at how technology, social media and crypto-currency has and will affect our privacy.

The 22 year-old is a fourth year student in Business Management at Salford Business School.

Since the social media data of millions was sold to Cambridge Analytica, the argument has risen whether personal information is being used unethically, even for game-changing events such as influencing the US presidential election or the UK Brexit referendum.

Debora, originally from Brazil, looks at how the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gather our likes and online habits and sell them on to advertisers.

Decide: Privacy or communication.

She says: “As Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest continue to monetise their users, the future of social media will become even more personalised.

“Even though we give apps access to our phones, contacts and other personal information, we deeply care about our privacy and communicating with our friends.

“We must therefore choose between communication and privacy during these modern intrusive times.”

Listening to us.

And she argues in her book that smart technology can make our homes less private, with devices such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home now capable of listening to user’s conversations, by identifying a trigger word.